I. At first sight (or hearing), there is a remarkable discrepancy between the apparently simple acoustic appearance of Kristof Georgen’s sound works and the complexity that becomes clear as soon as the listener attempts to settle upon what is being heard—as well as, more importantly, how it is being heard. Listening to a work for the first time, the audience is confronted with a multitude of tones, sounds and noises, which resound in a situation that is also spatially defined and for their own part render space audible. By rendering audible noises that can be interpreted or identified (since the material sources that cause them are simultaneously perceived or, to be more precise, imagined), an acoustic installation, a constellation of concealed or visible loudspeakers together with sound sources in a physical space, creates an imaginary space determined by the imagined sources of the noises and their echoes that imposes itself over the real spaces with its noises and echoes or, in the majority of cases, blends with this physical and acoustic space in a way no longer visually (or audibly) transparent. By using tones and sounds, however, such an installation at the same time brings into play explicitly musical modes of listening associated with an entirely different type of auditory space. Initially, this interpenetration of real sounds in real space with recorded and edited or artificially produced sounds or tones possessing their own space seems part of the tradition of expanding the notion, or rather the genre, of ›music‹. This expansion, with which primarily John Cage must be credited, provided a model for the subsequent, more generally known, widening of the notions and genres of ›painting‹ and ›sculpture‹, but also those of the ›concert‹ and ›performance‹ in the nineteen-sixties. It was indeed the case that the blasting open of musical composition through introducing chance—random elements variously radical in type—into the situation of the musical performance occurred earlier than analogous developments in the visual arts, thereby stimulating a comparable evolution in the latter field. Thus, it is no coincidence that almost all key figures in the emergent Fluxus and Happening performative movements of the late nineteen-fifties and early sixties had adopted directly from Cage their new concepts and notions of artwork and material. Of the various steps—including the prepared piano, chance composition, the use of uncontrollable sound sources such as the radio, the arbitrariness or freedom of the performer, the uncertainty in regard to the execution—taken by Cage in order to incorporate chance in composition or music, the last and most radical was accomplished with the composition 4'33". When the piece was first performed at Maverick Concert Hall in Woodstock, New York on 29 August 1952, the interpreter David Tudor realised this »tacet for any instrument or instruments «1 by not playing or, rather, playing nothing—for all of three movements, since every situative and contextual condition for a piano concert was given: the expectant audience, the concert setting, the interpreter on whom all eyes were trained, the open grand piano on the stage. And play, in fact, Tudor did: he played in the sense that an actor plays a pianist, but he did not play the piano. 4'33", a work in which no music of any kind is produced by the performer, in which only silence as opposed to a musical composition becomes audible, is radical in its perfection of the expansion of the concept and notion of music: the many small, senseless and incoherent micro-noises of the real situation take the place of the anticipated piece of music created by a composer and belonging to a musical system. The noises have not been composed, are not associated with meaning or subjectivity or expression, and are therefore neither predictable nor repeatable. In this ›silence‹, the work of acoustic art that takes place in its own aesthetic time (the duration of the performance), that due to the work of an author amounts to a fixed, composed aesthetic totality and is perceived in an aesthetic ›hinterwelt‹ (belonging to the mental world of the intellect or the consciousness) beyond the real space and real time is replaced by the real situation, in which material acoustic events (almost always microevents) take place permanently and without interconnection. These events do not speak, do not mean anything, express nothing, just occur suddenly and without connection, that is to say: contingently. They have nothing to do with the world of the mind or the consciousness, the world of subjectivity, of meanings and sense, but refuse utterly to give themselves to sense. Like most musicians, John Cage viewed his work as amounting to an expansion of the musical material and of the notion of music. As was later the case in the visual arts (with, for instance, Joseph Beuys), the concept of expanding or extending did not place in question the fundamental understanding of the artwork or of art itself but implied that change was brought about by the inclusion of other areas previously considered incapable or unworthy of art status. For Cage, then, the transition from the tones and sounds to the noises seemed to be gradual, as had been first formulated in Luigi Russolo’s deliberations in The Art of Noise, 1913, so that the musical material is expanded without being fundamentally altered or brought to collapse: »We want to attune and regulate this tremendous variety of noises harmonically and rhythmically. (…) Noise in fact can be differentiated from sound only in so far as the vibrations which produce it are confused and irregular, both in time and intensity. Every noise has a tone, and sometimes also a harmony that predominates over the body of its irregular vibrations. Now, it is from this dominating characteristic tone that a practical possibility can be derived for attuning it, that is to give a certain noise not merely one tone, but a variety of tones, without losing its characteristic tone, by which I mean the one which distinguishes it.«2 Even if Cage loosened even further the connection of noises to tones and sounds, he continued to view noises as belonging to an extended musical sphere. However, those of Cage’s pupils who launched the Fluxus movement not long afterwards clearly saw—together with a number of other artists, among whom Andy Warhol was foremost—that the traditional understanding of the artwork that was so binding upon Modernism had collapsed with 4'33", if not before. According to the traditional notion, artworks were language-like compositions created by an author from purely visual or purely acoustic elements whose jointing and constellation creates or transports sense (or at least aesthetic sense). With his capabilities of authenticity, originality and spontaneity, the author gives articulation to himself and his world in a work therefore imbued primarily with an intellectual-aesthetic reality. Although this plane of meaning and aesthetic sense requires material carriers, these carriers are inevitably transcended in the artwork. Viewed in material terms, every tone or sound is a noise brought forth by an object, just as every colour in a painterly composition consists, in material terms, of paint; yet this carrier material is submerged in the hermeneutic process, in the understanding and interpretation of the artwork—just as the acoustic materiality of language goes under and vanishes in the process by which the meanings are understood. With 4'33", this kind of aesthetic-semantic listening is no longer possible. There is no more authorship, no composition, no aesthetic system with its elements and its grammar, no meaning and no expression. What remains are the subjectless, meaningless, contingent noise events that factually exist without sense. They demand a new mode of listening that becomes possible only through a break with aesthetic listening, since any audience engaged in aesthetic listening—during a concert, for example—actively screens out the chance noise events occurring in the real situation. The distinction between the intentional, composed tones and sounds and the chance ambient noises is a fundamental element in differentiating the material and aesthetic worlds, both of which demand and presuppose entirely different attitudes. In order for the previously screened-out noises to become perceptible in their own right, it is necessary to first abandon the idealist-aesthetic attitude and then build up a new attitude that is ›aesthetic‹ in an entirely different, materialistic sense. The break with compositional musical listening might be described as a disappointment: the listener must abandon his expectations, above all the expectation that another subject, the composer, is about to declare himself, make himself comprehensible. The listener must take leave of the intellectual-aesthetic world with no hope of a replacement; that is indeed a loss, among other things. The disappointment over this loss makes it possible in a second step to become aware of what is in fact audible, those chance, senseless noises that have nothing more to communicate or express but can be perceived in their own right: disappointment liberates the listener from the illusion of the sense. With the notion of ›boredom‹, Andy Warhol attempted to define a comparable process that the viewers of his early films are obliged to go through. Denied everything principally expected from a film—plot, drama, subjectivity, links—the viewer who spends hours watching a sleeping figure, say, or the Empire State Building, succumbs to boredom. In the course of a multi-layered process, the bored viewer may begin to notice that viewing material is on offer the whole time: but what is on view is stark reality (nearby members of the audience, the auditorium, the scratches on the canvas, the distribution of shadows over the screen) or else recorded, unedited reality. »My first films using the stationary objects were also made to help the audiences get more acquainted with themselves. Usually, when you go to the movies, you sit in a fantasy world, but when you see something that disturbs you, you get involved with the people next to you. (…) You could do more things watching my movies than with other kinds of movies; you could eat and drink and smoke and cough and look away and then look back and they’d still be there. It’s not the ideal movie, it’s just my kind of movie.«3 By interweaving and overlayering music (sounds and tones), voices (as language carriers and musical carriers) and recorded or electronically created noises in his sound installations, therefore, Kristof Georgen produces multi-layered acoustic constellations that force the listener to perceive disparate attitudes simultaneously. Equally, however, this demands a concentrated alertness that perceives and takes to full term the ruptures between the attitudes, above all between the aesthetic and semantic attitude on the one hand, and the functional or objective on the other. The various acoustic planes and attitudes are not supposed to blend diffusely, but are intended to be precisely heard through being clearly differentiated and grasped within the framework of their own laws.
II. Kristof Georgen’s sound works play above all with the intertwining of the various attitudes towards acoustic phenomena and the very disparate types of space that make these phenomena audible — in reality or in the imagination. In that process, the two classical attitudes towards acoustic perception amount to poles (one functional, one aesthetic) whose explicit, or at least implied, presence is important in every work of art by Georgen: the perception of acoustic phenom ena as music, as acoustic work of art, hears tones and sounds within a system (normally the tonal system in the wider sense), as a constellation of purely acoustic elements whose composition yields an articulated unity of meaning: the work of art. The perception of voice as a verbal language hears voice as a carrier of semantics, within a system of elements, of words that are integral components of symbolic order or structure of language. The aesthetic attitude and the semantic attitude are related, and both belong to the field of consciousness or meaning; both create in related fashion a mental, immaterial and dimensionless space of understanding and reception that opposes the material space and cannot be identified as being located within the latter—generally, this created space is perceived as a placeless, ubiquitous presence (of the sense). These closely related idealistic attitudes contrast with the functional attitude that registers noises. Noises are not heard as elements in a structure, as carriers of meaning in the framework of the unity of a work or a message, but as real events in real space and within the flow of real time. From the outset, then, noises are not placed in reference to other noises in the way that tones or sounds are heard in relation to other tones or sounds, but as isolated, contingent and incoherent events they are queried in regard to where they take place and by what they are produced. Noises gear the perception to their place and their material source; noises do not speak, do not offer material to be listened to, but exist as real conditions and are subject to identification. Through being perceived as realities in real space, however, noises also make the space audible: the acoustic orientation in a space identifies the location of noises, and in this way enables the mental reconstruction of a space (in the manner necessary when darkness, for instance, incapacitates vision). The spreading and the reflection, the echo of the noises in the space, creates an acoustic image of the architecture. The same function is accomplished by the playing of recorded noises: they too create the illusion of a real space. Overlayering each other in a manner that is not distinct, the noises of the real spatial situation interpenetrate with the recorded sound until no longer distinguishable. There are a number of reasons for the indistinguishability of this interpenetration. One important factor is the severely curtailed function in the acoustic realm of a distinction entirely clear in the visual realm: that between the real and illusionary, between perception and imagination. In the visual realm, the separation between pictorial space and real space is clearly defined by the wholly dissimilar optical constitution of either (the picture surface that produces the illusionary space as an effect, and the real, three-dimensional space in which the viewer is present with the body). Moreover, either space is generally distinguishable by a demarcation of the perimeters that separate them, namely the frame that surrounds the picture surface and separates it from the environment. In this visual realm, the viewer sees himself as master of the situation who directs his gaze at will and chooses what he wants to see. In relation to what is viewed, therefore, he adopts the position of the voluntary actor. In the acoustic realm, the identification of noises and of space is always connected with the notion (or imagining) of the source and of the echoing space, regardless of the question whether the noises are real or technical reproductions: insofar as identification takes place on an optical basis, the perception of sources of noise is indeed imaginary. In an acoustic space, moreover, no stable, locatable distinction is possible between the illusionary nature of reproduction and the reality of perception: the space does not visibly reveal whether the noises heard are real or reproduced (unless the technical sources of reproduced noises, the loudspeakers, have been accentuated or labelled). Much more than the viewing subject in the optical world, the hearing subject is at the mercy of the acoustic world; in order to imagine and construct this world on the basis of noises and their echo, the hearing subject is in a position of perceptible belatedness or passivity in relation to the noise events, while the viewing subject perceives himself as the active master of his gazes and the activity of looking. A further consequence of this discrepancy is that the recollection, and not just the identification, of tones and words wholly differs from that of noises. Tones, belonging to the language-like system of tonality, and words, belonging to the system of language, are perceived by being placed in relation to other elements of their system and take on meaning as a result of this play of differences: they make themselves heard, then, within the actuality of meaning. Noises, by contrast, are merely existent, are mere events without meaning. That is why their identification is bound to memory (and, in specific cases, to recollection); they are recognised in their reality as concrete, particular, primarily sensory and only secondarily material, circumstances. They can join up with the notion and the concept of an object, their source, only through sensory recognition. The analogy with the field of the visual reveals an interesting asymmetry: the sensual reality of light or of the reflection of light normally cannot be perceived separately in the visual realm: the identification of the perceived object takes place within the act of perception itself, thereby subsuming the perceived under the linguistically determined registration. Only in cases where the visual is wholly detached from the physical—in a colour, or even in the glare of light—is it possible to experience a sensual visual reality independently of the identification of bodies. In his sound installations, Kristof Georgen advances as far as possible the potential to make real noises (or likewise sounds and words) indistinguish able from reproduced or produced noises, sounds and words; he pushes this indistinguishability up to the threshold at which the listener is seized by a productive confusion forcing him to observe and reflect upon his own acoustic reception and its modes of operation. A crucial means of provoking such confusion is that the artist often records and edits the real noises of an existing situation, an existing space, then feeds them back into this space, with the result that there is scarcely any difference between the real noises and the recorded noises, sounds and words, producing a play of the opaque acoustic reflections, of the echoes and repetitions, that simultaneously duplicates (or, rather, multiplies) and calls into question both the actuality of what is heard as well as the reality of the acoustic space. The fictive acoustic space superimposes itself over the real space, blends into the physical space without covering it up, certainly without usurping it: the heard space changes, expands (which is why listeners often tend to close their eyes: the acoustic space is increasingly at odds with the space seen in reality). Only in the moments of silence when the work of sound is mute is the listener plunged back into the visible space, which suddenly seems cramped and sterile. The tension between two poles that are far apart is permanently being built up and articulated in Kristof Georgen’s sound installations: between a reflective pole, which through the play of contradictions between the various attitudes and spatial perceptions induces the viewer to observe himself while listening to and reflecting upon these contradictions, and a concrete, documentary pole of recorded noises - mainly of situative, local origin (like in Zirkulation (Jugendtraum), 2008, or Leerstand, 2007) - and conversations (like in sprechen, 2002, or Der Klang der Wirklichkeit, 2008) or songs (singen 49.03º / 8.24º, 2003). The recorded material is seldom played without previous editing; the artist interferes with this ›real‹ material, too, adapts, condenses and layers it, in some cases to a degree that disrupts comprehensibility or audibility. Kristof Georgen deploys methods closely related to those of film, on the one hand, and of the radio play, on the other. The cutting techniques, the isolating of fragments that in a second step can be repeated to become elements in a derived, secondary musical structure, originate in film cutting and are also widespread in music (from the advent of Minimal music onward). The work with loops, which was initially dependent on analogue media, subsequently on digital, and later accomplished with electronic sampling, makes it possible to generate transient, momentary cut-outs that are no longer conceived compositionally in the traditional sense. Instead, they demand and introduce new criteria, because editing turns contingent excerpts from acoustic sequences into volatile, situative and momentary units with which the artist then works. Cutting also includes techniques of superimposition, of fading in and out, of montage in the broadest sense. The interference with the vehicle (in the case of analogue media) also allows the noise of the carrier itself (a record perhaps, or unexposed film) to be made audible or visible (the stillness or the blackness). Georgen’s modes of dealing with original sound are reminiscent more of the radio play: the way he makes audible spatial circumstances, the echoes and the noises - and therefore the atmosphere—specific to a situation. Above all, however, the acoustic material enables layering and superimposition within the same space of perception - just as in the early work of Steve Reich, for instance, the deployment of layered phase shifts recorded successively then superimposed over each other combined methods of cutting with those of layering.
III. However, Kristof Georgen’s methods upset not only the relationship of real, situative acoustic space (the material space of the listener) and fictive, reproduced acoustic space (the space in which and from which noises were recorded and whose reproduction in real space alters, rips open and manipulates the latter) - achieving an unsettling effect that is relatively understandable, since real and reproduced noises are barely distinguishable, if distinguishable at all, while being heard - but also unsettle the unambiguous auditory perception that always takes place in line with one of the defining attitudes. In the scope of the functional, objectively identifying attitude, noises are registered from the material source that lends to the noise its material identity. In the framework of the musical attitude, of an idealistic-aesthetic attitude, tones and sounds are viewed as the articulation of aesthetic and subjective meaning by means of the structure of tonality; and within the framework of the structure of language, words and sentences are interpreted and understood as symbolic strings of signs. The acoustic identification of noises clearly differs from the optical identification of objects, being considerably less individualising and registering the noise source somewhat generally as a type. This difference is especially connected to the fact that the noise source is ›seen‹ or, more precisely, imagined only through the work of the imagination: it is not registered as clearly different from other individuals of the same type, then, but remains general. Yet, this means, conversely, that noises can be recalled as sensory phenomena, almost independently from the imagined source and its term. There is a strong relationship of the noise to recollection, then (also in the strong sense of the word along the lines of Sigmund Freud, or also of Henri Bergson’s Memoire involontaire), and merely a weak relationship to abstract identification—in this sense, hearing (as soon as it leaves the firm territory of the languages of semantics and music) is one of the entirely physical senses like taste, smell and touch. In contrast to optical phenomena, noises are rooted much more in personal memory than in cultural knowledge, much more in recollection than in the concept. In his sound installations, Kristof Georgen now systematically disrupts the identity or comprehensibility of the acoustic materials deployed. For one thing, he destroys the comprehensibility of speech utterances or disrupts the aesthetic evidence of musical constellations. More important still, however, is how he edits and manipulates noises, deprives them of their objective identity in such a way that they are increasingly separated from their source and virtually liberated from the function of being an attribute of an object that vibrates in any manner. Here again, the analogy with visual art provides some clues. With the collapse of the idealist aesthetic around 1960 and the associated categories of authorship, artwork and aesthetic experience based on aesthetic and subjective meaning, there came into being a new art that no longer composed, no longer created a self-sufficient visual language used for articulation by an author, but instead recorded real circumstances (photography, film, video) or staged them (for purposes including recording). These new arts no longer assume an idealistic-aesthetic attitude (that refers to a language-like aesthetic system) but instead the general, modern, functional attitude (that identifies material objects, bodies, in the material world). However, this functional attitude changes extensively if it no longer intends to identify bodies but instead confirms the world on the basis of the multiple sensual qualities of the bodies or objects: when it makes visible all the visual phenomena that exist, everything viewable that can be found in reality. A second, even more radical, step no longer involves the listing of bodies, the recording and archiving of the existent, but the experiencing and the active, zestful differentiation of the entirely qualitative differences in the visible. The existence of the bodies in the quantitative world of a wholly homogenous, continuous and measurable natural world, of an entirely recognisable natural world conforming to the functional and scientific world model constructed by European Modernity, a world subjected to the laws of nature, is not denied or transcended in the direction of a spiritual world ›hinterwelt‹). Instead, the qualitative, sensual differentiality of this world is perceived in its own right—a discernment more familiar in the area of scents and nuances of taste than in the field of visual differentiation. A corresponding materialistic-aesthetic attitude can likewise be adopted in regard to noises. As a result, there is no transcending or denial of the fact that noises are real phenomena of the material world; instead, the complex sensory qualities of the noises are differentiated and affirmed. Yet, it is apparently difficult to perceive noises wholly separately from their sources—or, accordingly, to perceive tones and sounds (or, as applicable, words and sentences) separately from their aesthetic or semantic system: normally, in any noise we hear we also hear a source (and be it fictive) or several possible sources, just as it is almost impossible not to hear a tone or a sound within a noise. When Eric Satie, for example, used a typewriter, a siren and the propeller of an airplane in his composition of Parade as far back as 1917, this transgression (of the musical material) lived precisely from the fact that these mechanical noises are inevitably heard also as real noises that make the listener imagine their source—an object producing the noise—and on the other hand as tones in the context of the musical composition. Since Anton Webern, the qualitative, sensual area of sound has been systematised (at least partially) in music by the name of tone-colour. Tonecolour is non-quantifiable from the outset, and therefore unable to be comprehended and recorded in a concept. Thus, tone-colour possesses an irreducible relationship to its materialistic aisthesis—to a qualitative, sensual and differentiating perception—even if it has become secondarily analysable through being associated with specific instruments, that is: with certain recognisable sources. Due to a number of subsequent inventions in serial music, for instance through clusters, the qualitative range of tone-colour was expanded. Already clusters can scarcely be heard through—heard analytically, that is to say—in a musical system (the tonal system), but amount to a weak system of tone-colour. But only with the electronic generation of sounds and noises (both terms are no longer apt in this context; for lack of a precise term, let us talk of noise-sounds) independently of the tonal system are we confronted with acoustic phenomena able to defy both the tonal system as well as the identification of a source. In the measure according to which these phenomena become unable to be heard through, a mixture of frequencies with no predominant key tone that no longer order themselves to the ear or the mind, they become noise. Various types or ›colourings‹ of noise can be deployed and heard sensually-differentially (as a kind of extension of the tone-colour). Here again, the analogy with the optical field becomes interesting: for abstract painters, pure white (Kasimir Malevich, Piero Manzini) or pure black (Malevich, Ad Reinhardt) was always extremely interesting as a synthesis of all colours; yet, this synthesis of all colours additionally amounted to a colour-value sensually identical with itself that is categorically multivalent, but sensually simple. This simplicity does not function in the realm of sound: White Noise that is likewise a synthesis of tone-values can no longer be perceived as a separate, simple tone but presents itself as an impenetrable wall unable to be acoustically heard through. The permanent presence of the different acoustic attitudes, the different fundamental modes of hearing, generates complexity and a kind of density. Kristof Georgen generally holds in the balance the noises, sounds and words he deploys, balancing them on the narrow precipice on which their comprehensibility or audibility delivers (barely, but no more) points of connection to the listener, provides him with acoustic horizons of noise-producing world or aesthetic sense or, as applicable, semantic meaning. These points of connection, that are closely linked with recollection, allow or suggest even a multitude of associations, memories and sensations that belong to personal history as opposed to general knowledge. In this sense, noises are generally more personal and intimate than optical phenomena and also optical reproduction media like photography or film. Due to the ambiguity of the edited noises, an acoustic density is produced that can be amplified by layering of all kind fuelled above all by the indistinguishable multiplicity of the edited noises and sounds: not only through the simultaneous allusions to different worlds—the world of material objects or bodies and the world of meanings or of aesthetic sense—made possible by the layering of noises, sounds and words, but already due to the fact that the individual edited sound or noise phenomenon is ambiguous in itself. And with this multiciplicity, different acoustic spaces simultaneously come into being: material realms in which the noises echo and acoustically scan the space, or immaterial, mental, to some degree space-less aesthetic realms of composition or semantics.
1 The Harvard Biographical Dictionary of Music, ed. by Don Michael Randel, Cambridge (Mass.), 1996, p. 128.
2 Luigi Russolo: The Art of Noises (1913), quoted from die wiener gruppe: a moment of modernity 1954–1960 / the visual works and the actions, ed. Peter Weibel, Vienna and New York, 1997.
3 Andy Warhol, quoted in Peter Gidal: Andy Warhol—Films and Paintings: The Factory Years, New York, 1971, (2nd ed. 1991), pp. 92–95.
From: Brigitte Digel, Bernd Künzig (Eds.): Kristof Georgen Sound, Cat., Text: Nicole Fritz, Bernd Künzig, Johannes Meinhardt, Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg, 2009
Translation: Tom Morrison